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The fact that they chose flex funding for the campaign, the video looks like a spinning minecraft creation and doesn't have any real direction on how they will proceed, isn't very convincing. I've backed the Parallella project(http://www.parallella.org/, which for a $99 computer, will far outpace this and is an open source hardware project). The ProjectQ motherboard that will run any OS (which is going into my next development box) even is more appealing regardless of the price difference in hardware. While it is good that they have a noble idea and thought to contact Phoronix for news coverage, their idea is half baked, especially when involving hardware, especially considering the amount they are asking for.

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Unless they wish to also release VHDL files, which I doubt, this isn't a huge thing really. It's really not about x86, but arm, at 99 USD, you don't have a lot of x86 options. x86 has firmware/microcode issues that would work against their statement.

As for arm, the most open SoC is the Allwinner A10, A20 series and there the only thing left, is lots of man-hours to write/port/clean the drivers. You have a fully opensource platform (sans GPU, which libv is working hard on).

So what exactly are they crowdfunding? Or they just trying to get rich quick over our backs?

Comment

Unless they wish to also release VHDL files, which I doubt, this isn't a huge thing really. It's really not about x86, but arm, at 99 USD, you don't have a lot of x86 options. x86 has firmware/microcode issues that would work against their statement.

As for arm, the most open SoC is the Allwinner A10, A20 series and there the only thing left, is lots of man-hours to write/port/clean the drivers. You have a fully opensource platform (sans GPU, which libv is working hard on).

So what exactly are they crowdfunding? Or they just trying to get rich quick over our backs?

There are a few x86 options that are cheap in bulk, the AMD Fusion line and XCore86 however are the only ones that have adequate open source support at a low price point.
The only other option there is VIA, and Unichrome doesn't have the best FOSS support.